The Commission on Elections (Comelec)  yesterday ended its 10-day registration of voters in the  Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), the region notorious for many of  the country’s dirtiest elections.
The registration, aimed at cleansing the region’s bloated voters lists which showed ARMM with 1.7 million voters, started July 9 and ended yesterday despite pleas from local officials to extend it for at least a week.
Commissioner Rene Sarmiento, in an ambush interview yesterday, said that as of early yesterday morning the trend seems to indicate that registrants will definitely not reach 1.7 million and estimated it to be somewhere within 1.2 million.
Sarmiento  also clarified that at the end of the registration,  those who filed  their voters applications are not yet considered registered voters since they have to go through the next step which is the approval or disapproval of the Election Registration Boards (ERBs).
Sarmiento said that one of the problems the poll body encountered during the registration was the presence of so many minors filing applications for registration, some even looked like they were 12 to 13 years old.
The ERBs with the assistance of election officers (EOs) were tasked to weed out unqualified registrants.
In a separate interview, Comelec spokesman James Jimenez said it would have been an exercise in futility if the poll body did not allow these minors to file their applications, as the possibility of disturbance that may escalate into violence was very real, so that instructions were given to Comelec personnel to just filter them out later through the ERBs and EOs.
The election watchdog Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting meanwhile reported that as of early Wednesday morning they had monitored 1.5 million registrants. The PPRCV has personnel manning each registration center at ARMM.